We're Back in Sydney

Hello again, this time from Woolworth's in Sydney! We've spent the last few days in and around Melbourne where its been quite a bit colder than the tropics of the Whitsundays - can you imagine having to cope with a mere 18C or so?!

We spent our first couple of nights right in the centre of Melbourne, having picked up a hire car for the 4 days from the airport. Thankfully the sat nav in my phone worked like a dream so we managed to find our way around ok! It was a shame we didn't have longer to spend in Melbourne - although it lacks the world famous attractions of Sydney, it feels like a great place and it seems like we barely touched the surface. There are a lot of trams in the city and one of them does a loop around the city centre and is free, so we hopped on that a few times to help us get our bearings. Surprise suprise, Cara wanted to visit the Queen Victoria market so we had a look around it on our first morning.

We also took in Federation Square in the city centre before heading off to take in the site that is the reason for the entire trip. Yes...Ramsay Street. Oh dear. It was closed off as they were filming so there wasn't a lot to see and not a sign of Harold Bishop. We both feel cheated. After that we drove around the bayside area (to the south east of the city centre) and spent some time on a few of the fantastic beaches there, though it was a bit too chilly to be there for long. We went to a place called St Kilda which was very nice - the main street was cake-shop-tastic with almost every other shop window being full of huge cakes. Obviously we had to try them after having a traditional German chicken schnitzel sandwich at a Greek cafe!!

After that we headed back up to the city centre to meet up with John (McIntyre) who'd kindly offered to put us up for a couple of nights. Again, the sat nav did a fine job of getting us to his office up to the point where it told us to do a u-turn and then do a u-turn. After one u-turn, we were told to do a u-turn then do a u-turn (I feel this is the sort of thing I could have programmed!). After several hours of u-turns, we gave up and found our way to John's office!

We went from there down to John's house in Mount Eliza (back down the Bayside way), via a butchers for some steaks and snags for the barbie! It was a great dinner, although still quite cool so we had to eat indoors. The following day (yesterday), both John and Mhairi had taken the day off work so they took us out and about the local area (after a barbecue breakfast) which was fantastic, especially as it had warmed up quite a bit. We went up Arthur's Seat which is right on the coast and has some fantastic views as well as taking in a local winery and having lunch at a waterside restaurant called The Rocks, which was fantastic. It was great to see some of the sights that we'd otherwise have missed if we'd been on our own.

We'd hoped to meet up with a few other friends when we were in the Melbourne area, but unfortunately our planning let us down and we just didn't have enough time, as mentioned above. It was a real shame as it would have been good to see them all - it was great to see familiar faces at John and Mhairi's and we should have been more organised to fit in some more. We'll just need to come back I think!

Today we're back in Sydney after taking a short flight this morning. We're now staying a bit more centrally in the Darling Harbour area and plan to just take it easy for a few days and will hopefully manage to catch up with a few more friends while we're here.

We've managed to get some photos from our time in Australia uploaded to Flickr, so follow the link on the right to see them. We're still a bit behind with our uploading but we'll hopefully manage to catch up eventually - there are still some pics from Vietnam to be uploaded plus all the ones we took in Cambodia, Thailand and Singapore!

1 Comment

Ric's Mum & Dad:

October 26, 2008

Can't believe that you have less than a month left out there, but make the most of it......its awful weather here, changed the clocks last night so its 4pm and is dark raining and windy....other than that it's just great!!
We're tearing apart your old bedroom, disposing of furniture and redecorating it Ric, so prepare for before & after photos, have a lovely pile of memorabilia for you to sort out when you get back, think you'll need a new house to store it all!